Lightroom Video – Before and After Travel Photography

This week I’m going to a very popular video series I did a while back called “Before and After”. Basically, I click the Reset button on one of my photos in Lightroom and take you through the entire editing process, from start to finish. In the end, we can see the before and after and you’ll see exactly how everything unfolded in between. This week’s photo is one I tool while teaching in Dubai last year. Exposure-wise, it’s pretty straightforward, but you’ll see that we’ve got some perspective correction to do that requires a little more than Lightroom can swing, so we’ll need to jump to Photoshop as well. Enjoy!

Matt is the full-time Director of Education for Kelby Media Group and a Tampa-based photographer. He's the Editor-in-Chief of Lightroom Magazine, the lead instructor on the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom LIVE Seminar Tour and author of several best-selling Photoshop books. Matt also hosts the world's top Lightroom blog, LightroomKillerTips.com, where he's built up a massive library of Lightroom videos, presets and tips. In addition to teaching Photoshop, Lightroom and photography seminars around the world, he's an instructor at Photoshop World and one of the full-time staff writers for Photoshop User Magazine.

34 Comments

Joni Kesti

August 10, 2011

Ahem, actually I wouldn’t recommend to CROP your images BEFORE retouching unless you want to spend extra time fixing your image from parts that you run out of “original footage”. If you need to use Photoshop to your images use it from the start to finish, then save and return to Lightroom to do the final calibration.

Hi, Matt. This discussion probably isn’t the place to ask my question, but I don’t see a “Contact Me” link to reach you; so this will have to do.

Is there some way to make your video full screen? I don’t see a button for that. The window is so small I can’t read the text such as menus you’re showing. If I’m missing something, feel free to “e” me instead of cluttering up this thread. If I can work this out, I want to review more of your videos.

Excellent tutorial. Why do you prefer to do sharpening in Photoshop? I don’t see a lot of difference between USM in PS and Sharpening in Lightroom. On an image like this I would kick in Lightroom’s masking option on the sharpening to mask out most of the sky so that the sharpening won’t bring out any dust spots or other weird stuff in the sky. Of course you can mask in PS as well but LR makes it dead simple. Plus Lightroom sharpening is non-destructuve.

Shut the front door. Seriously. I knew that LR + PS was powerful, especially after watching my post-production friend in advertising work magic in PS on a daily basis, but this tutorial kind of blew me away. I just made my 6YO son watch it with me, but he wasn’t very impressed. Sorry. He’s into Harry Potter right now and it’s certainly nothing that Harry couldn’t do with his magic wand, I suppose. Thank you for sorta blowing my mind this morning. I think I’ll go have a doughnut, now.

Matt,
When you went to PS to further edit your image, couldn’t you have gone into the crop tool and selected the Perspective option? I have found it a pretty good way to straighten one side of an image while leaving the other alone (most of the time anyway).

I pre-ordered the book as well. Even though I’ve seen a ton of tutorials, you always manage to add some fresh insights or techniques. Your writing style is as concise and lucid as your videos and I’m certainly not one to dole out easy praise.

Even if ‘Compositing’ turns out a refresher, it will still be fun to wade through. Can’t wait!

Thanks Matt. I am a PSE user and am currently switching from the Organizer over to LR3. This was a great help by seeing a photo actually being processed in LR. I am using Scott’s Lightroom book for my text. AND I have pre-ordered your new book.

Haha, yeah I literally went up to the top of this post to double-check the date. Knew I’d seen the photo before (along with the fixes), but then you were talking about your new book, so I was a bit confused. Glad it wasn’t just me!